The American myth of freedom, retold by nationalist historians, politicians, and the corporate media, erases the slavery, dispossession, and white supremacy upon which the republic was built.
American chauvinism remains the dominant ideology in the United States, on the right as well as on the left and center. The upcoming 250th anniversary of independence, which the country will celebrate on July 4, 2026, is another opportunity to express America’s ultranationalism and rewrite the country’s sordid history of oppression and genocide as a „history of freedom.”.
President Donald Trump, a hero to white supremacists and conservatives, declared: „With a single sheet of parchment and 56 signatures, America has embarked on the greatest political journey in human history.”
Former President Barack Obama—the best thing that ever happened to white American liberals—enthusiastically agrees: „As we are a few weeks away from America’s 250th birthday, it is worth recalling how radical the whole idea of self-government was in 1776.” He adds that the Declaration of Independence declared „that we are all created equal, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”.
Obama then gives a mild rebuke to the white, slave-owning settlers who declared independence for something that escaped their attention:
„In forming our Union, the Founders fell woefully short of the promise of the Declaration: they left slavery untouched, they allowed the states to limit the right to vote to white men of property, but in drafting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they had the foresight and the genius to provide us with a framework that would enable each generation to make our Union more perfect… And over two centuries… »We the People« has come to include not just some of us, but all of us.”
If a white South African were to claim that the establishment of the white-supremacist settler-colonial Union of South Africa in 1910 was the first step towards South Africa becoming inclusive of non-whites a century later, that person would rightly become the object of ridicule and condemnation.
Americans are shamelessly taught by their educational and political institutions, as well as their leaders—not to mention the sycophantic and monotonous corporate media—that America is the best thing that ever happened to the world.
However, the independence of the United States was not the best thing that ever happened to the world, but to the white supremacists within it.
As the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches, the hegemonic mythology of American benevolence continues to dominate political discourse as an unquestioned truth.
The relentless terror that this first independent state imposed—and continues to impose—on its own black and indigenous populations, its working class, and the imperially oppressed world is rewritten as the story of „American freedom.”.
The truth is, however, that the independence of the United States was not the best thing that ever happened to the world, but to the white supremacists who lived in it. Even the Nazis celebrated American independence as a precursor to their own regime. In his 1934 world history for Nazi readers, German historian Albrecht Wirth (1866–1936) wrote that „the most important event in the history of states in the second millennium—up to [World War I]—was the founding of the United States.” He confidently added, „The Aryan struggle for world domination received its strongest support.”
Adolf Hitler himself found inspiration in the American republic. He saw the history of American expansion—where settlers „shot millions of redskins down to a few hundred thousand, and the modest remnant is now kept in cages under observation”—as an inspiring precedent for the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, especially the Russians, whom he called „redskins.”.
Slaveholders' Revolution
The white supremacist demand for independence by the 13 British colonies in North America was not about universal freedom at all, despite America's shameful history being rewritten as a history of freedom.
Before independence, white settlers' disillusionment with the British Crown had grown along with the concentration of wealth in the hands of the English capitalist class, who competed with the colonizing merchants in North America. In an environment where profits depended on the expropriation of Native American lands and the use of slave labor, the 1763 Royal Proclamation, which prohibited settlers from settling on lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, heightened tensions. New taxes, such as the Sugar Act and Currency Act of 1764, and the Stamp Act of 1765, further reduced the settlers' profits to the benefit of the Crown.
Faced with the prospect of being exterminated, most Native Americans fought on the side of the British during the „War of Independence,” believing that a victory for the racist colonialists would bring even greater devastation. Tens of thousands died fighting for the British, while white colonists attacked Native communities allied with the Crown, destroying towns, killing thousands, and driving out entire communities.
Both the northern colonists and the British Crown promised freedom to oppressed black people if they joined their armies. More than 20,000 joined the British, including the Ethiopian Regiment of Virginia, after Lord Dunmore, the royal governor, issued a proclamation in November 1775 promising them freedom if they would help the British put down the impending settler rebellion. They wore the words „Freedom to the Slaves” on their chests.
It was the 1772 London anti-slavery court ruling in the case of James Somerset, a Virginia-bought slave who had been freed, that angered the white slave-owning settlers of the 13 North American colonies and precipitated the anti-English rebellion. The Dunmore Proclamation was the culmination of this process—a historical process of abolitionism that, according to historian Gerald Horne, transformed the colonists' quest for independence into a "counter-revolution against slavery.".
Unwavering in their commitment to slavery, white settler rebels, at the urging of „founding father” James Madison, required in their 1788 constitution (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3) that fugitive slaves who joined the British be „surrendered” to their American owners.
As for the independent Americans, only 5,000 slaves and freed blacks served with them—as cooks, laborers, spies, and soldiers—and after the war most of them were sent back to slavery. In contrast, the rebellious southern colonies—Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas—promised land and a slave to white male volunteers who fought against the British. After the British defeat, thousands of formerly oppressed people who joined them settled in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.
Freedom for the settlers
The British effort to incite oppressed black people to revolt against their independence-seeking colonists—something that so horrified Thomas Paine, another Founding Father—was condemned in the Declaration of Independence, which said the king had „incited domestic rebellions against us.”.
Historian Tyler Stovall concludes that „the American War of Independence thus became a war over slavery” and that „the American Revolution was a war fought for the right to enslave others in the name of freedom.”.
This white supremacy, which was the foundation of the American republic, became law in the first Naturalization Act of 1790, which limited citizenship rights to „free white persons” who had resided in the country for two years and their children under the age of 21.
For Paine, the enemies of independence were the enemies of white settler colonization. He warned: „You who now oppose independence know not what you are doing; you are opening the door to perpetual tyranny by leaving the seat of government vacant. There are thousands and tens of thousands who would think it glorious to drive from the continent that barbarous and infernal power which has stirred up the Indians and negroes against us; cruelty has a double crime: it treats us brutally, and it treats them treacherously.”
The „we” Paine refers to excludes „Indians” and black slaves. The latter made up about 20 percent of the newly independent United States’ population of 2.5 million. Although he opposed slavery and acknowledged the theft of Native American lands, Paine’s demand for American independence was rooted in white supremacy, viewing both oppressed groups as irrelevant to the colonists’ quest for independence.
The British commissioned a rebuttal, which took the form of a work by John Lind, a young lawyer and pamphleteer, entitled „Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress.” In his „Answer,” Lind mocked the hypocrisy of white colonists who declared their commitment to the equality of all men while holding oppressed Africans in chains. English abolitionist Thomas Day was even harsher: „If there is anything truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot who signs the resolutions of independence with one hand and cracks a whip over his terrified slaves with the other.”
Manifest Destiny
In 1783, the United States issued the Northwest Ordinance, opening up the lands north of the Ohio River and the Great Lakes to white colonial settlement—areas that the British had previously excluded them from. Historian Jeffrey Ostler sees the ordinance as the beginning of an official American policy of genocide against Native Americans, noting that its Article 3 stated that "Indians" were not to be "invaded or disturbed" except in "just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.".
Native resistance to land grabbing provided a pretext for the genocidal campaigns in the Northwest between 1787 and 1832. Ostler argues that the 1832 genocide was „the intended consequence of a policy decision codified in New York forty-five years earlier.” This paved the way for President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830.
All of this was fueled by the Christian idea of „Anglo-Saxon” uniqueness – a racial term applied to all white colonists and their descendants, believed to be descended from Teutonic tribes. Their supposed white superiority was seen as a justification for territorial expansion and the subjugation of „inferior” races, which formed the core of the „Manifest Destiny” project popularized in the mid-19th century.
By some estimates, one-third of the colonial population remained loyal to the Crown and opposed independence. About 4 percent of the white colonial population—about 100,000 people—fled the 13 colonies by ship, taking 15,000 slaves with them during and after the „American Revolution.” Half of them went to Nova Scotia, while the rest scattered throughout Britain, the Caribbean, and their original European homelands. They sought refuge from severe persecution by the revolutionaries, including loss of life and property, as well as discriminatory laws that remained in effect until 1812. This severe repression neutralized the loyalists who remained after the Revolution, helping to institutionalize the narrative of independence from British „tyranny.”.
The myth persists
The fact that the story of American independence continues to be told as a story of „freedom” by nationalist American historians and their followers, the chauvinistic corporate media, and the ruling political and economic class is an insult to the millions who were oppressed by those who led the American state from republic to empire.
That the history of this republic consists of a century of slavery, then a century of apartheid; that women were denied the right to vote for a century and a half; that Native Americans only became citizens in 1924 and were only able to truly vote after 1948, and in some states after 1955 – all this seems insignificant compared to these ongoing celebrations.
The terror of the McCarthy era of the 1950s, the suppression of student and civil rights movements in the 1960s, and their continuation today, are not reflected in this mythology of American „freedom.” Nor is America’s imperialist massacre, which has claimed tens of millions of civilian lives worldwide since World War II, not to mention the Iranian schoolgirls who were murdered in cold blood just a few months ago.
Instead of calling on America’s citizens to celebrate a regime – as Trump and Obama do – that has historically oppressed most of them and intends to oppress even more in the future, critical historians, journalists, activists and opposition politicians should insist on condemning the white supremacist, sexist and class-based project of the Founding Fathers and deny them once and for all the role of freedom fighters that was never theirs – since they sought freedom exclusively for white, Anglo-Saxon, wealthy and slave-owning men.
The millions of Americans who resisted and continue to resist this oppressive system in the hope of a true democracy, not the system that oppresses them, should be celebrated on the 4th of July.
